


talk without speaking

by trell (qunlat)



Category: One Piece
Genre: Conqueror Haki, Consent Issues, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-28
Updated: 2015-11-28
Packaged: 2018-05-03 19:15:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,143
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5303483
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/qunlat/pseuds/trell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>They’ve been fighting for days, in that complicated sort of way where everyone wants to be on the same side and can’t be.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	talk without speaking

He thinks afterward that Strawhat wasn’t expecting it any more than he was.

It’s a stupid thing, an accident. Strawhat’s eyes go wide and shocked before Law’s even processed it, and there’s no duplicity there, just horror; and Law knows, really, knows the moment after it happens that it wasn’t intentional, wasn’t meant. Knows even as he reacts that he’s being unfair.

Just an overtone of conqueror haki in Strawhat’s bark of _don’t leave, Torao!_ in the middle of an argument over their alliance, the compulsion weak and the shockwave no more than a shiver over his skin. It’s enough all the same, leagues over the line, his decision instant.

Law turns and walks away without stopping.

*

(He doesn’t see Luffy reaching after him, just for a moment, mouth soundlessly open; irrepressible boy, struck into silence by what he’s done.)

*

Hours later—

Law hides out on the stern, legs pulled in, arms wound around his sword, and he shakes. Hates himself for always dissolving into tremors; squeezes his hands under his knees to still them, stares out at the ocean. Relives the moment again and again in his head.

A bark in a voice demanding that he obey, the twinge of a compulsion in the back of his mind, an argument that could’ve ended in an instant with his forced acquiescence. The whole of the universe, seen suddenly through a new and filthy lens.

It leaves him cold and sick with fear.

No amount of repetition— _he didn’t mean it, didn’t mean it, didn’t mean it_ —makes the feeling go away. That Luffy wouldn’t do that, that Luffy wouldn’t try to take his choice away, that dominating Law’s will must be the last thing on his mind; these are all true things, and none of them will stick.

What it feels like is a violation. Was a violation; a breach of trust that he can’t imagine coming back from, an attempt to take even his mind away from him, to bind him just as surely as with shackles. That it was hardly there, that he resisted it without any exertion, these things are true, too; only they don’t stop his shaking, either.

 _Didn’t mean it,_ Law tells himself, and tries to make that matter; thinks about what Luffy could have done if he’d meant it, and doesn’t.

*

Nami is the first to notice Luffy’s uncharacteristic gloom.

He sits atop his preferred place over the _Thousand Sunny’_ s bow and frowns fiercely out at sea for hours. Hours is hours longer than she can remember him ever having been down before, save for in the most dire of times; even then, his definition of dire has always been different than that of anyone with a lesser brand of optimism.

(For Luffy, Nami’s found, _dire_ means something he himself has wrought, not any sort of outside danger. Assaults by an enemy, attacks of the physical or psychological variety, those he can handle; protecting his friends comes as naturally to him as a second wind does to a seasoned runner. Dealing with some mistake he’s made, however—)

So; Nami knows the general why if not the specific, and when their onboard guest doesn’t show up to that night’s dinner she can guess that, too. They’ve been fighting for days, Law and Luffy, in that complicated sort of way where everyone wants to be on the same side and can’t be; Luffy demanding that Law stay and fulfill his promises of defeating Kaido, Law fending him off with half-formed sentences.

She remembers exactly how the last time Luffy arguing with someone he cared about went down, on Water 7. The fallout had been—caustic.

For Luffy’s sake, for all of theirs: she hopes this time won’t end quite so badly.

*

It’s difficult to avoid anyone for long on board a ship, even one as spacious as the _Sunny_. Law manages, anyway; sleeps on the stern that night when the weather proves stable, doesn’t eat because fetching food would mean seeing Luffy.

And keeps thinking; trying not to think, and knowing it; that in the end, in the depths of himself, he’d do anything that Luffy asked. No matter how stupid Luffy’s request, no matter how dangerous, no matter how little reason he gave him, he would—out of trust that Luffy would never hurt him, maybe, and truly out of blind faith, out of the weak and clinging thing inside him and its pathetic and desperate need to believe. Kill for him and die for him and even, Law’s discovered, live; anything, _anything,_ and—

And so having Luffy force his hand shouldn’t be different at all.

He can’t explain even to himself why it is.

*

Two days of arctic separation later Nami climbs up to the figurehead, leans forward so she can cross her arms on the curvature, and asks, “Are you going to talk to him?”

Luffy whips around to look at her from where he’s been watching a school of New World fish break across the waves. He looks intent, like he’s been thinking hard (thinking at all); brows drawn together, he tells her, “Talking isn’t gonna work.”

“What’s your other option,” Nami points out. “You can’t fight him. You’d wreck the ship, for starters, and that’s more collateral damage than I’m willing to pay for.” Any collateral damage owed to a spat is more than she’s willing to pay for, actually, but she doubts Luffy would appreciate the nuance.

“Don’t wanna fight him either,” Luffy says. Adds in afterthought: “I’d win, but it wouldn’t help.”

Nami would be stunned by this growth of character if she didn’t think it intuition. Still, anything that steers Luffy clear of damaging the ship is something she supports, so she purses her lips and says, “Okay. Not talking, not fighting—why wouldn’t talking work, exactly? He won’t listen?”

“No,” says Luffy, and, “maybe.” Then: “He can’t trust my voice.”

“What?” says Nami, baffled.

“My voice,” Luffy hurries to explain, “when I was on Hancock’s island, old man Rayleigh taught me how to make it stronger. To use it against living things, ‘cause there were all these giant monsters and taking ‘em on all together didn’t work—he showed me so’s I could stop ‘em before they even got to me.”

Nami parses this, “You mean the haki thing, right? The one Sanji and Zoro say you’ve got and they don’t?”

Luffy nods vigorously. “Yeah! I had to use it all the time back then, ‘cause these monsters were everywhere and the old man wouldn’t help.”

“But what’s this got to do with Torao,” Nami says, feeling like she’s missing something big. “You said you don’t want to fight him, right, so Rayleigh teaching you how to use this thing—”

“It’s not just about fighting,” Luffy interrupts her. “It makes things like me.”

Nami stares at him. “Like you,” she repeats, and suddenly remembers something Usopp and Chopper told her after Fishman Island, about Luffy having stopped a ravenous sea king with only a look and a gesture, without a single punch. She’d dismissed it as Usopp’s obsession with dramatic flair and Chopper’s gullibility, but— “You mean you can make things do what you want?”

“And people too!” says Luffy and sits back, clearly pleased she’s understood. “And I got really used to doing it, ‘cause otherwise the monsters didn’t let me sleep . . .”

“Luffy,” Nami says slowly, the realization dawning, “did you use it on _Torao?”_

“It was an accident!” The admission is more defeated than defiant.

“ _Luffy!”_

“So,” he goes on glumly, tone something very like upset, “he got really mad, I guess. He didn’t say anything and walked away, and now—”

“—and now talking to him won’t work, because he knows you could do it again,” Nami finishes for him.

Luffy’s eyes are saucer-like and serious when he meets hers. “I wouldn’t! I wouldn’t, I didn’t even want to before. But it’s like you said, it doesn’t matter.”

There’s a pause, and Nami—finding herself suddenly out of simple solutions—heaves a deep sigh and pushes off the back of the figurehead. “Shove over,” she says, and clambers up next to Luffy. “We’ll think of something, okay?”

Their captain looks a little less droopy at that. “Okay,” he says, and moves over.

*

Law spends the second night of his self-imposed isolation remembering.

It had been one string, one string per arm, that was all it took; all Joker needed to make Law’s hands his own, to make him do his bloody bidding. Not so unlike the nightmares he’d had every night, back then, the ones where he stood in the White City and tried to stop it all and couldn’t move, or—closer still—the ones where he knew what he’d find if he entered the hospital but couldn’t stop his feet. Couldn’t stop his reality from ticking over, _daughter_ into _orphan_.

He’d gouged out someone’s heart. Joker had, with his hands, or he had; but he’d still had his mind, then, knew enough to know that when his hands moved on their own it wasn’t him, wasn’t his desire. Just another nightmare.

It chills him to the bone that when Luffy had said, _don’t leave_ : he hadn’t known.

*

They can’t keep apart forever, of course.

It’s Strawhat that comes to him, in the end, for all that Law isn’t sure that between the two of them it’s not himself that ought to be crawling back for forgiveness. Shows up where Law’s been cooped up strangely quiet, with only his shadow falling across the deck from the evening sun at his back to announce him; Law hardly hears him coming at all.

This absence of his usual thunder is almost enough to pull an apology out of Law right then and there, _sorry, shouldn’t have gone, all my fault_. But he’s been over and through this for days in his head and so he doesn’t, swallows the impulse, says only: “Strawhat.”

“Torao,” agrees Luffy, and hovers in his periphery. Law doesn’t look at it him. If he looks he might falter; if he looks—

Strawhat shoves something under his nose.

Law jerks back hard enough to whack his head against the wall behind him. “What—” he gets out, and looks up; expects to be met with a barrage of words in explanation, with noise, with emotion. It’s never once been in Strawhat’s nature to hold himself back.

Instead he finds Luffy before him with a fierce expression on his face and his mouth firmly shut, still holding the—paper, he sees now—out towards him. A beat, and Law takes the hint, takes the crumpled page from him, looks back down to unfold it.

Reads what’s on it once, and again, and finally asks, “Why on paper?” Follows this stupidly with, “You can’t write,” looking up.

“I asked Nami to write it,” says Strawhat. “ ‘Cause paper can’t make you say yes.”

Law stares at him. Strawhat stares back, uncharacteristically nervous; and Law’s never seen him like this before, forcibly silent, ready to vibrate clear out of his skin with the effort of it, waiting for an answer.

_Because it can’t make me._

His heart skips with the realization. The words he’d been struggling to keep down punch out of him in a single overwhelmed breath: “I knew—I know you didn’t mean it. I know. I’m sorry. I understand.”

“I won’t do it again!” cries Strawhat, and there’s all that fervent energy breaking his surface at last, deflating suddenly out of him, “not _ever,_ I’m so sorry, Torao, it was an accident but that doesn’t make it better but I’ll _be_ better and I’ll make it so it never happens again, ‘cause I don’t want you to wanna do things just ‘cause _I_ want them, and—”

“Luffy,” Law says dazedly, “Luffy, shut up.” And reaches out (it occurs to him as he does it that he hasn’t done this before, hasn’t touched Strawhat first, not like this), and, not daring to give himself time to reconsider, pulls him in for a hug.

Strawhat, miracle of miracles, shuts up. Wraps his skinny arms around Law in return without hesitation, instead, and stands there letting Law hug him in blessed silence.

After a while, he says—quietly, like if he’s quiet it won’t count—“Are we okay?”

“Yeah,” breathes Law, from where he’s resting his chin on Strawhat’s bony shoulder. “Yeah, we are.” A moment later Law pulls back, though Strawhat hardly seems to mind staying as they are; tactile as ever, like if he’s not in contact with someone (slouching against them, arm slung over their shoulders, hands half-touching, always something) he might disappear. Like he’s not alive without other people around him.

“Never again,” says Strawhat seriously. “I promise.”

Luffy’s promises aren’t made lightly, Law knows.

“Okay,” he says, and watches Luffy’s face light with a smile.


End file.
